Page 159 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Visual Culture 143

few humans who have actually floated in space, you are relying on a rep-
resentation of someone else ’ s vision to form this idea. In the same spirit,
most average Americans have never physically traveled to Iran, or Pakistan,
or south - central Los Angeles for that matter, and yet they are regularly
called upon to make political decisions that have a profound impact upon
people who live in these places. The opinions we form and the actions we
take are often based upon little else than the limited range of visual repre-
sentations made available through the mass media. The screen doesn ’ t
represent a window that allows us to traverse time and space and gain
unfettered access to distant places, any more than taking a tour on a glass -
bottomed boat gives us a complete idea of what ’ s happening under the
entire ocean. Someone chooses where to point the camera, just as someone
decides where to steer the boat, and these judgments determine how we ’ ll
perceive and think about what we see.
It may be more productive to think of the screen as a two - way mirror
rather than as a window. A window suggests that we, as viewers, are auton-
omous, fully formed individuals looking out at the world from a position
of self - mastery. But what we see on the screens that surround us infl uences
not only how we understand the outside world, but also how we come to
understand ourselves. We cannot recognize ourselves as individuals until
we see representations of ourselves. With our own eyes, we can only see
fragments of our bodies – our hands, feet, the front part of our torsos, a
portion of our backs – but there remains significant territory that is by

nature off - limits to our unmediated perception, and therefore unknowa-
ble, incomplete. We can only know ourselves completely with the aid of
an intervening medium – the mirror – which allows us to see ourselves as
objects; we become ourselves by objectifying ourselves. But, to take the
metaphor further, in a two - way mirror, there is someone else there, watch-
ing us watch ourselves. We know we are being watched, but it is unclear
by whom. Nevertheless, this knowledge leads us to act in certain ways, to
perform in a style that communicates who we are. The screen of visual
culture works in similar ways: it gazes at us even as we gaze at it. It simul-
taneously refl ects us and creates us.
Visual culture doesn ’ t operate in a vacuum; it exists in a symbiotic
relation to the lives of real people in real places. For example, a media
phenomenon such as Sex and the City draws upon the desires, anxieties,
and values of many women who are trying to reconcile the contradictory
paradigms of traditional femininity (associated with motherhood and mar-
riage) and third - wave feminism (characterized by sexual independence and